I was born at the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains in the small town of Louisville, Mississippi, the county seat of Winston County. The area is also referred to as the Red Hills in reference to the red earth that can be seen where roads were carved through the hills to make travel possible throughout the region.

Mississippi became the 20th state to join the union in 1817, but it wasn’t until 1833 that our county was officially surveyed. Before that it was Indian territory under the leadership of the Choctaw Indian Chiefs Pushmataha and Mushulatubee.

After the Treaties of Doaks Stand and Dancing Rabbit Creek most of the Indians were forced leave the area and move to the Oklahoma Territory. The few that remained lived on a reservation twenty miles south of my home.

With the aid of the federal government building private roads, the surrounding area became more and more populated as settlers pushed westward. Louisville was finally incorporated in 1836.

Old Robinson Road was one of the main thoroughfares in the area and ran from Columbus to Jackson, Mississippi. It was built while Indians were still living in the area and it was a dangerous path to travel in the early days. Not only Indians, but bandits would lie in wait for unsuspecting folks going west.

My Allgood family first appeared in the United States in the early 1600s. Upon tracing my lineage I found a Richard Allgood that was imprisoned in England as a reprobate and sent to work in the sugarcane fields of Barbados. I have often wondered if it was he that escaped, made it to Virginia and fathered my Allgood ancestors that were documented living there.

Another of my Allgood ancestors married a lady named Abigail Harris who descended from royalty. I won’t bore you with the royal family tree, but through her bloodline we have been able to trace family members back to the 10th century. Try as I might, my wife refuses to call me Sir Richard.

When my ancestor, John Allgood, fought in the Revolutionary War he was awarded a land grant in Elbert County, Georgia and his family relocated there. After several years some of his descendants made their way westward and ended up in Mississippi.

When they arrived in Winston County they settled in the Plattsburg Community near the Attala, Leake and Neshoba County lines. It was an area known as Four Corners because that was where all four of the counties connected. About a mile east of Plattsburg was the old town of Pinny Shook where the Council Houses of the Choctaw Indians was located.

Plattsburg stood a good chance of becoming the county seat until the railroad came through In 1905 and split the county in half. It ended up going through Louisville. When that happened Plattsburg dwindled to nearly nothing.

My first ancestor to arrive in the area was Asa Allgood. It appears he came around the time the Indian treaties were signed. He and his wife, Sarah, died around 1850 when the typhoid epidemic swept across the south and are buried on a hill in Mt. Nebo Cemetery near where they lived. The next couple of generations were buried at a place called Smallwood not far away.

The story goes that Smallwood was named after an unscrupulous fellow that did a lot of trading with the local tribes and one day they caught him swindling them out of their goods. They had a little trial, killed him and buried him in a hole upside down to keep his spirit from ever rising again.

Before typhoid fever killed him, Asa begot Levi and Levi begot Reuben and Reuben begot my grandfather Louis. It was Louis’s brother, Lafayette, (Fate for short) that decided we didn’t need two Ls in our surname and convinced his two brothers to drop one.

Levi lost a leg during the siege of Vicksburg, but survived to make it home to Plattsburg. Reuben’s first wife died young so he remarried, had another son, Marshall and then was killed when a horse reared up a came down on top of him. His young wife took Marshal, left and returned home to her parents, leaving my grandfather and his brother with Reuben’s relatives.

Allgood remained with one L until I was born and the nurse that filled out my birth certificate filled it out the way it sounded, with two Ls. No one seemed to notice until I applied for a passport in the late 1990s.

When I looked over my birth certificate I caught the error and was afraid the powers that be would reject my application due to that discrepancy. Evidently the folks at the passport office could have cared less and sent my passport back with just one L.

After my grandfather and his siblings became orphaned he and Fate moved in with their aunt and uncle, Mary and Johnny Keene who lived along the north side of Old Robinson Road four miles west of Louisville.

My father, Harold, married my mother, Rochelle Foster, shortly after he returned home from World War II. They had met before the war when she was working in a store on Main Street.

Her ancestors arrived in the county around the same time as my father’s, but they ended up settling on the east side of the county near the Noxubee and Neshoba County lines in an area known as Fearn Springs. Some called it Skillet because someone once visited a relative in that area and had such a good meal he said, “I declare, that was such a good meal I believe I could lick the skillet clean.” Strange, but supposedly true. I guess back in those days handing out names to places was easy since no one had ever been there before.

The Fosters weren’t the only members of our clan to settle in that area. There were Eaves, Sullivans, Hydes, Cockrells, Arledges and a lot more.

It was said of my ancestor, Rufus Sullivan, that he had gotten into a landline dispute with his neighbor back in the Carolinas. One thing led to another and they ended up in an all out brawl, rolling around, kicking, punching and biting. In the process of the fight the neighbor’s finger ended up in old Rufus’s mouth and Rufus bit it clean off.

Biting must have been a genetic disorder because I was a biter when I was a child. Thankfully, I have outgrown that habit.

After they were both tuckered out they parted ways and went to their separate homes. The more Rufus thought about it the more worried he became that he might have to go to prison for amputating his neighbor’s finger. Sometime in the middle of the night he woke his family and servants, had them load everything they possibly could onto their wagons and they disappeared into the night. That’s how my Sullivan family ended up in Winston County.

Back to my mother’s side of the family. There came a point in time where there were so many Foster kinfolks in the area the families became concerned that their children would end up marrying kin. Something had to be done to diversify the gene pool. After much debate, about half the Foster clan decided it would be prudent to move away, so they sent a scouting party south to Louisiana to look for land.

(To be continued)

	Louisville Depot in the early years.
That is the courthouse. Note the original city well in the center of the street with the pyramid roof over it. In 1913 electricity came to town and the poles were erected on the north side of Main Street, so this picture predates 1913.	Reuben Allgood
Left to right; Reuben Algood, Harold Algood ( my father)and Louis Algood. The original house that stood on Oak Hill Farm can be seen in the background.

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Rick Algood
August 17, 2021